Uploaded November 2013 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
The Prime Time Invasion was a lineup of programming that I gently suggested to the management a few weeks after I arrived in Green Bay. (To give Jay and Joe a lot of credit, there was absolutely no reason whatsoever for them to pay any attention to the suggestions of the newly hired 25-year-old promo producer from Arkansas, so it would be disingenuous for me to try to claim sole credit.) I noticed, when I arrived, that our fall schedule had a lot of sci-fi and fantasy programming scattered on various nights and time slots (at the time, UPN only programmed Monday through Wednesday), so I suggested consolidating all of these shows into the prime time hours and putting them under an umbrella theme: Prime Time Invasion. We got local voice talent Bill Lumay to do thunderous movie-trailer-style voice overs, and from Wednesday nights through Sunday nights, we were quite frankly rivaling the Sci-Fi Channel for the amount of sci-fi on the schedule. (We were certainly programming more actual sci-fi than Syfy does now.) Shows considered "Prime Time Invasion" shows included the UPN Wednesday night shows (Star Trek: Voyager, The Sentinel), the Universal Action Pack shows (Hercules, Xena), the last vestiges of the Warner Bros. PTEN package (at this point, that meant Babylon 5, until it left syndication at the end of 1997), and other syndicated shows we had picked up (Earth: Final Conflict, Team Knight Rider, Honey I Shrunk The Kids: The Series, nightly syndicated strips of DS9 and Voyager). We were taking a risk programming to what was considered a niche audience - and for the first ratings book that the Prime TIme Invasion was in effect, we were one of the top ten fastest-growing UPN affiliates by audience share in the country. This was, quite simply, some of the most fun I ever had working in TV.
The Prime Time Invasion was a lineup of programming that I gently suggested to the management a few weeks after I arrived in Green Bay. (To give Jay and Joe a lot of credit, there was absolutely no reason whatsoever for them to pay any attention to the suggestions of the newly hired 25-year-old promo producer from Arkansas, so it would be disingenuous for me to try to claim sole credit.) I noticed, when I arrived, that our fall schedule had a lot of sci-fi and fantasy programming scattered on various nights and time slots (at the time, UPN only programmed Monday through Wednesday), so I suggested consolidating all of these shows into the prime time hours and putting them under an umbrella theme: Prime Time Invasion. We got local voice talent Bill Lumay to do thunderous movie-trailer-style voice overs, and from Wednesday nights through Sunday nights, we were quite frankly rivaling the Sci-Fi Channel for the amount of sci-fi on the schedule. (We were certainly programming more actual sci-fi than Syfy does now.) Shows considered "Prime Time Invasion" shows included the UPN Wednesday night shows (Star Trek: Voyager, The Sentinel), the Universal Action Pack shows (Hercules, Xena), the last vestiges of the Warner Bros. PTEN package (at this point, that meant Babylon 5, until it left syndication at the end of 1997), and other syndicated shows we had picked up (Earth: Final Conflict, Team Knight Rider, Honey I Shrunk The Kids: The Series, nightly syndicated strips of DS9 and Voyager). We were taking a risk programming to what was considered a niche audience - and for the first ratings book that the Prime TIme Invasion was in effect, we were one of the top ten fastest-growing UPN affiliates by audience share in the country. This was, quite simply, some of the most fun I ever had working in TV.
